The Herd(34)

“I asked her about AV needs yesterday and she sent a couple sentences back. I’ll forward it to you—what’s your email?”

I supplied it, then gave an awkward laugh. “So I guess you didn’t hang on to my business card as carefully as I did yours.”

“Nah, I know exactly where it is. Actually”—he chuckled self-consciously—“I was gonna hit you up and see if you wanted to get a drink sometime. But now…yeah.” I understood: Now that Eleanor was missing, now that we were mid-crisis, it seemed obscene to plan a first date. Still, something in me sat up like a meerkat at the news he’d planned to ask me out.

“I got the forward,” I announced. “I should let you go.”

“If I can help with anything, lemme know,” he replied. “I’m good with tech shit, so maybe I can help.”

“Thanks. I worked as a tech reporter, so I’m no Luddite, but I might take you up on that.”

I pulled my laptop cord from my bag and stooped to plug it in behind my nightstand. I spotted the flash of purple Post-its and set them on the table. In the light, there was definitely something legible in relief, and I grabbed a pencil, shaded carefully. In Eleanor’s wild loops was what appeared to be gibberish:

ACA 1010 CUU ESEGYM



Was it a code? Google was no help. I took a photo of the shaded note, cranked up the contrast, and printed it out, followed by my snapshots of Eleanor’s bank statements, then slid everything into a folder.

Keep going, Katie, keep going. I quickly checked her social feeds: Eleanor hadn’t posted to Facebook in a few days, and she hadn’t liked anyone else’s photos or updates since yesterday morning. Her last personal update—about as personal as she got on Instagram—was of a rubber plant drinking in the sunlight, a slash of snow visible on the window behind it. She’d captioned it “Calm before the storm,” likely because it went up on Monday at 8:18 a.m., before the start of a bustling week.

It rose through me without warning: a plume of anxiety, neon and strong. Eleanor could be dead. My chest tightened and I felt a swoop of dizziness, but I gripped the sides of my desk and fought it. Breathe in. Breathe out. Focus.

I returned to my email and saw that Hana was gathering data on our latest contact with Eleanor. No one had seen her, it seemed, since last night’s Mocktails, and everyone was pretty sure they’d left before her. I squinted, again scanning my memories for anything unusual as the crowd clinked glasses and admired the Elm Grove’s pretty floral-patterned trays and napkins. Normal, normal, normal.

New cameras had gone in sometime last week, Hana had said, so we should be able to check exactly when Eleanor had left. She was typically one of the last people to head out, especially the night before a work-from-home day. I drummed my fingers on the edge of the laptop, then pushed it aside and found my notebook:

? Access security cameras (Ted?)

? Security cameras at street level? On Eleanor’s street?

? General background checks on E + D: financial trouble? New lawsuits, arrests?

? Open relationship: Who had Eleanor met up with?

? Confirm Daniel’s alibi last night/today: date (app/site?) + work

? UGLY CUNTS vandal: related? Leads?

? Where are E’s laptop + phone?



I leaned back and tapped the pen against my lips. This was helping, a narrow egress for my worry. Something was bothering me from earlier today, prickling at me like stinging nettle. I wound the night backward in my memory, back across the bridge to Eleanor’s apartment, then inside Hana’s Lyft, and then Hielo, its back hallway, in all the servers’ way. Here the feeling intensified, desperate as a charades player when your guess is so close. Hana cinching in the huddle, Daniel on speakerphone…

I caught it, snap: Hana had said something about location services—how Eleanor hadn’t turned hers on, how last week it hadn’t done her any good. Eleanor had shown up with a new phone case last week, a robin’s-egg blue that matched her new Herd-branded background, one of Mikki’s designs—and I’d hazily filed this away as a detail for my book proposal (“so chic, she changes cases the way most of us change handbags”). Was it actually a new phone? Had she lost (or ditched) the old one for some reason?

My call to Hana went straight to voicemail, so I dragged my laptop back onto my knees and looked over my list. The spray-painting bandit intrigued me most, but I wasn’t sure how to chase him down. Daniel, then—what did any of us know about him, really, from before he meandered into Eleanor’s life? What other skeletons were in his closet? And where was he last night?

I sent him a friend request on Facebook and, in the meantime, clicked through his profile photos. Most were of him and Eleanor, but one fit the bill: selfie, his game face encircled in a navy hoodie, his beloved Yankees splashed across his chest. I dragged it into a search engine, then—

Bingo. Scouring the Internet, Google had found this exact same photo on Click, an online dating site. I made a throwaway profile, limited all my filters, searched for terms I’d seen in Google’s preview, and—

“Gotcha,” I murmured aloud.

Three photos, the hoodie one cropped so it was from the nose down, a vacation photo centered on his blue tank top and surprisingly chiseled arms, and then—I felt myself blush—an admittedly hot topless selfie from the chin down. Hello there, 82menace.